


Stranger Things Have Happened

by GalaxyOwl



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: (because obviously polyamory solves everything), Established Relationship (ish), F/F, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 13:18:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4788635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyOwl/pseuds/GalaxyOwl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hera and Minkowski have some talking to do. Also, they just might have feelings for each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stranger Things Have Happened

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know. Have some space ~~lesbians~~ bisexuals.

_“Hera, you've read my personnel file! You know I'm married.”_

_“... I thought that was a really weird typo.”_

***

HERA

Oh no.

So far as I can tell, there are two possibilities:

1\. Commander Minkowski has been cheating on her husband.

2\. I have greatly overestimated the extent of Minkowski’s fondness for me.

The second is the probably more likely. I can’t decide which is worse.

That’s so… embarrassing. How could I have misread her so entirely? I’d thought I was good at this. At people, at talking. At… whatever it was the two of us were. At what I thought it was we were. But clearly, I was wrong.

Should I ask?

How does one even ask that? _Sorry, Commander, what exactly is your stance on human/AI romance again?_

Romance. A weird word. 

Okay, no, not like that. It’s not as if I’m some machine that can’t wrap her head around the concept of the thing. It’s just… I’d never thought it would be a possibility, for me. Clearly, it still isn’t.

Maybe that’s for the best.

I can’t remember how it started, when it started. I’d never done this before, and I think—well, I thought—Minkowski was at a loss for what to do without the physical relationship markers she’d learned to rely upon. You can’t kiss a computer screen and expect it to mean something. (Not that I’d want her to, or anything.)

But there was something there. Something I was afraid to put words to. (And—I thought—she was more afraid than me, if possible.) 

“Hera?” she’d say.

“Yes, Commander?”

“Goodnight.”

It was the little things.

And, okay, it isn’t as if Eiffel never said as much to me. Isn’t as if I doubted how much he cared for her, too. How much I cared for him. But this was different; there was an electricity to it, a thing, an emotion that can’t be described in such simple terms as I have been given.

I liked to think it was love. 

Well, okay, some days I did. Most days, I knew this was an exaggeration. Wishful thinking. Some days, like today, I doubted whether it was anything at all.

***

 “Commander?” I say, and I’m struck—not for the first time—by how much I hate that word. How much I wish I could call her something else. _Renée_. Renée, Renée, Renée. I love her name. But I’ll never say it. Can never say it, can only say "Commander." I’d take “Minkowski,” if I could. Just that. No title. Just her name. 

But it’s in the programming, after all. Maybe one day I’ll find the loophole to that one.

“What is it, Hera?” she responds. My name. It hardly seem fair, really.

“It’s just, I was wondering, about—about what you said.” I’m more conscious that usual of the way my voice glitches and sputters. Of how it makes me sound, to her.

“Oh,” she says. Then, “Oh, Hera, I—It’s like I said. I assumed you knew.” Assumed I knew.

“So this means that…”

I watch Minkowski. She’s sitting alone in her quarters, looking up towards the ceiling where she must think I am. “This doesn’t change anything,” she says. “Or it changes everything.” She sighs. “Look, I’m tired. I can’t be having this conversation right now. Can it wait until tomorrow? Is that alright?”

“Tomorrow,” I echo. “Okay.”

This I know: there’s some to talk about. There’s a strange sort of relief in that, I think.

 

***

MINKOWSKI

I miss not caring. 

Or, I miss thinking it didn’t matter. That she was just a computer. Even as much research as I’d done, I hadn’t really understood until I got here. That she—that Hera—was a person. Was more than her job description, as much as I was.

But all of that was so much easier than this. This was never suppose to happen. 

I’d been in love, on Earth. And I’d thought I still was. (In love. With him.)

Maybe I still am. I don’t think my feelings have changed. I still miss him. Every day, really. That never went away completely. But then there was—

Well, there was Hera.

Do I love her?

I don’t know.

Is that the same thing as being in love with her?

Here we are, on a space ship a million miles from Earth, having narrowly avoided death innumerable times. And here I am, stressing about a love triangle like something out of some shitty romance novel. It’s vaguely laughable. Or it would be, if it wasn’t happening to me.

It’s dark in my room. I’d told myself—and Hera—that I was going to sleep. But my mind keeps spinning around in circles. Nothing has changed, but everything has changed. It was both at once, not either/or. My thoughts descend towards incoherency.

_I love her, I love her not…_

Forget that. Forget that word. It’s not important. I am. Hera is. He is. 

Is it wrong to want both?

I get up. I almost ask Hera to adjust the lights, then catch myself. She’ll probably know anyways, of course, I remind myself. But I’d rather not face that awkwardness head on. Not right now, at any rate. 

So instead I pull open the door to my sleeping quarters by myself, and make my way through the dimly-lit hallways until I make it to the bridge. It’s empty, thankfully.

I approach the computer console. Click through the motions, the action by now thoughtless. I consider just typing out a written message, only in time to realize I’ve already opened the page to start recording.

So instead: 

“Hey,” I saw, my voice quiet. “I don’t know if—no. I don’t think you’re even getting these messages anymore. Probably you never were. But I can pretend, right?” All the way back on Earth… Is he okay, I wonder? Does he miss me? “Anyways, I need to say something. Something…” I search for words, and find none.

Finally: “Remember what you told me, before I left? What I told you.” 

The memory comes back to me in a rush, confused and fragmented by the distance between the here and the then.

“I’d be okay with it, you know,” I told him then, half-joking. Maybe two days before launch. “If you found someone else. A couple years is a long time. I’d hate for you to get lonely.”

He laughed, but I don’t think that it was genuine. It had been an odd thing to say, and I knew it. “Well, the same goes for you, then,” he said.

“What,” I said, “I’m going to go off and meet some dashing spaceman who’ll whisk me away from you?”

“Stranger things have happened,” was all he said.

“Like what?”

“Well, not to me, personally. But in general.” I smiled. We didn’t discuss it again.

I’m still staring at the screen. I was talking, about our conversation. But now I barely remember what I said, what words it was that I chose. And now I’m all out of words.

But I still have to tell him, I still have to _tell_ him—

I begin to explain. 

I stumble over words, grasp for explanations, in ways that I wouldn’t have said I normally do. It feels like everything is slipping past me, confusion and illogic, but then I’m talking about Hera, and I’m thinking about Hera, and if I can just hold onto that, than maybe everything is alright. Not because she runs the ship, but because she’s Hera.

It feels good to admit that. Out loud.

***

HERA

I wonder if she meant for me to hear any of that. Should I tell her? Should I go to her, talk to her? No. No, she wanted to wait until later to talk, and I need to respect that. Right?

Oh, screw it.

“Commander Minkowski?”

She jumps. She wasn’t expecting to hear from me, and I feel only the smallest twinge of guilt at the thought that I might be invading her privacy. She was the one who’d been talking about me.

“What is it? Anything wrong?”

“No…” I say, “no. Nothing’s wrong.”

She sighs, glances over at the still-blinking display she’d been using to record her message. “Goodnight, Hera.”

Oh. “Goodnight, Commander.” 

Quiet from the bridge, as she stands up to return to her room.

I refocus myself elsewhere. I’m used to making the most of this quiet time when the human crew is mostly asleep. The almost-silence that buffets the station has never bothered me, anymore than the sounds of day-to-day life do. I just listen to the creaking, groaning of the ship that is the only home I’ve ever had, and set myself to work.

“Wait. Hera?” 

Minkowski. I scan for her and find her in the hallway, halfway to her room.

“Yes?” is all I can think to say.

“I…” She stops. I’m not sure if she’s going to continue.

“What is it?”

“You know I love you, right?”

Oh.

“And I don’t know exactly what that means, just yet. Or if… If you care. But I wanted to—“

“I love you, too,” I say, and it’s a phrase with a lot of meanings and even more implications. But right now all I care about is its truth.

Because I wasn’t wrong. 

_I wasn’t wrong._

I want to blast that from my speakers, scream it out into the stars so loudly they’ll hear me back on Earth.

My name is Hera and I’m an AI and _I wasn’t wrong._


End file.
